Arrest of Senior Journalist Vinod Verma Is Reminiscent of the Emergency

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Verma was arrested in the middle of the night merely at the behest of a state government. It is an alarming sign.

Senior Journalist Vinod Verma. Credit: Facebook

The arrest of senior journalist Vinod Verma from his home in Ghaziabad on October 27 is a blatant interference in professional journalism besides being a human rights violation. When you barge into a journalist’s house at 3 am and arrest him in front of his family without any warrant, it is a clear example of authoritarianism.

For hours, the journalist was held at the police station and interrogated. Meanwhile, he was not even allowed to freely speak to his lawyers. When several journalists and editors reached the police station to meet him, the police refused to allow them to see or even talk to him.

Such police action was last practiced either during the British era or during the Emergency in the post-independence era, when civil rights activists, intellectuals, writers and journalists used to be picked up on the government’s orders and put behind bars.

Today, I see it happening yet again. It is quite shocking that a journalist who spent several years with an organisation like the BBC, was the digital editor at Amar Ujala and has worked for Deshbandhu newspaper besides contributing to several other reputed newspapers and forums, is being painted as a dreaded criminal or felon. All this because he is allegedly involved in a sting operation against a leader of a particular political party and minister of a certain state government.

The manner in which the Chhattisgarh government dispatched a police team to Delhi to arrest Verma points to a very dangerous and autocratic attitude.

As per the information received so far, the FIR was lodged in Chhattisgarh on Thursday (October 26). The state police swung into action and hastily arrived in Ghaziabad that very day. No investigation was carried out in the matter, nor were any aspects of the case probed. The alleged accused in the matter (Vinod Verma) was not even given the opportunity to narrate his side of the story.

Verma was arrested in the middle of the night merely at the behest of a state government. It is an alarming sign. I believe it is meant as a warning to the rest of the country’s journalists that if they try to write against the government they will meet a similar fate. They can be arrested on dangerous charges assassinating their character and ruining their career. As a journalist, this kind of conduct of the government immensely worries me.

I believe that if Verma did something wrong, a proper investigation ought to have been carried out with due legal process. But the way Verma was arrested in the dead of the night reminds me of a dangerous and despotic trend.

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Yet another assault on the media! I suspect this is only going to go up as the 2019 general election gets nearer, so that journalists who do not toe the establishment line and keep doing their job honestly are silenced. While it’s easy for us to hark back to the 1975 emergency days, the taming/silencing of the independent media’s voice now is going to be more flagrant and brutal than anything that we have seen in independent India. Social media and internet highway have opened up avenues that are hard to shackle, which is why the method to presently curb any recrudescence of dissent and contrarian views will take different forms – in such wanton arrest without warrant, SLaPPs, and systematic intimidation to scare the daylights out of them.

alok asthana

Yes, it is a bad one. But it also a sign that Modi is completely rattled. Just not able to make a sane decision. Even an average thinker would have seen that allowing him to even publish the CD ( if that is really the case) will cause lesser damage to BJP than this act. Yet Modi does this. Clearly he is shaken up. It is not to say that what is happening to Vinod is a god thing. Only, he is a soldier who is contributing to the fall of Modi.

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